Confused demonyms notwithstanding, Romans from Mars is a fairly straightforward iOS offering from Sidekick Games: waves of green-skinned centurions are attacking your ramparts and you, a lone ballista operator, are tasked with holding them off. The Roman deity Jupiter supplies intermittent spells — an earthquake here, a lightning bolt there — but the bulk of Romans from Mars consists of launching huge arrows as quickly and accurately as possible against increasingly complex hordes of aliens. Unfortunately, it devolves into mindless tapping, while the free-to-play approach makes upgrades prohibitively expensive before long.

With a laser pistol in one hand and a glowing sword in the other, charging through long corridors filled with killer robots, oozing slime creatures, and alien freaks sounds like a good time. It is — at least to an extent — in Echo Prime. This sci-fi brawler from Robot Entertainment (Hero Academy) is a high-energy tap-fest that balances smart controls and formidable challenge. The satisfaction that comes from cleaving through droves of foes in a successful run dampens during longer play sessions, however, due to intense repetition that'll leave your wrists aching.

It’s entirely possible to overlook Even Up. In an app marketplace hellbent on grabbing your attention with busy free-to-play arcade distractions and Helvetica-and-clean-lines brainteasers, Even Up is so unassuming you might mistake it for a simplified Sudoku board. Seemingly taking its design cues from picture slider puzzles, solving each grid requires combining all numbered tiles on top of each other in sequential order until the screen is clear. You can push any numbered tile to a matching one on the grid as long as its path is clear – from there the combined tile’s number will be one higher than whatever it was originally.

Last year Telltale Games almost single-handedly redefined the quality of narratives in video games with its universally acclaimed Walking Dead series, and today the studio announced what we can expect during its highly anticipated second season. There's not much to go on at the moment, but one thing's for sure--we'll now be seeing the story through the eyes of Clementine, the little girl protagonist Lee Everett sought to protect in Season 1.

Games are rarely just released and left as-is anymore these days, especially on the App Store. Often, they’re tweaked and expanded with new content to match up with real-life events — particularly with notable holidays. We’re just a couple days away from Halloween, and many popular iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch games have been updated with content that celebrates the spooky season. Whether it’s new weapons and costumes or fresh locales and missions to enjoy, these 10 games are (or will soon be) decked out with Halloween flair.

Rosetta Stone’s products immerse you in the language you are learning with its innovative teaching method and lessons that force you to think like a native speaker. Rosetta Stone Arcade Academy, a free-to-play iOS educational game, attempts to build on the foundation of the computer-based language courses by introducing some gaming components as it teaches you the basics of Spanish. The result, unfortunately, is a frustrating experience that often distracts more than it enlivens the process of learning.

The holiday season increasingly looks like it'll be an interesting time for gaming, and not just because of the release of the new Xbox One and PS4 consoles on the near horizon. We've already seen leaks for Logitech's iPhone gamepad in response to Apple's declared support for "Made for iPhone" (MFi) controllers with iOS 7, and today MacRumors reports that another one has surfaced from MOGA.

If you haven't heard, Telltale Games has been doing some magnificent things with narratives and video games these days. First there was its masterful Walking Dead series that nabbed several Game of the Year awards last year, and now there's The Wolf Among Us. And now, iOS lovers, rejoice--The Wolf Among Us will be coming to the iPhone and iPad sometimes this fall.

Each week, we highlight a selection of the most interesting, exciting, and unique new iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch titles released on the App Store. Glossy action affairs lead the week’s offerings, with sci-fi dungeon crawler Echo Prime and free-to-play zombie blaster Dead Trigger 2 debuting in the App Store. Also particularly intriguing this week are Even Up and Combat Monsters, with already-released brawler Combo Crew receiving a huge update in the form of playable Street Fighter characters.

CSR Racing was an unconventional entry for the racing genre, seeing as it included very little actual racing. Instead of steering around obstacles, you were tasked with dragging down a straight stretch of road, with timed control prompts like gearshifts used to influence your performance. Still, it became a massive free-to-play hit, spawning numerous copycats along the way. Follow-up CSR Classics offers much of the same tone as the original affair, though with the added element of classic hotrods to appeal to the gear head in us all.